Gamers Need Great Data and Connected Platforms

Who remembers their first game of Pong? Celebrating more than 40 years of innovation, gaming is no longer limited to monochromatic screens and dedicated, proprietary platforms. The PC gaming industry is expected to exceed $35bn by 2018. Phone and handheld games is estimated at $34bn in 5 years and quickly closing the gap. According to EEDAR, 2014 recorded more than 141 million mobile gamers just in North America, generating $4.6B in revenue for mobile game vendors.

This growth has spawned a growing list of conferences specifically targeting gamers, game developers, the gaming industry and more recently gaming analytics! This past weekend in Boston, for example, was PAX East where people of all ages and walks of life played games on consoles, PC, handhelds, and good old fashioned board games. With my own children in attendance, the debate of commercial games versus indie favorites, such as Minecraft , dominates the dinner table.

Online games are where people congregate online, collaborate, and generate petabytes of data daily. With the added bonus of geospatial data from smart phones, the opportunity for more advanced analytics. Some of the basic metrics that determine whether a game is successful, according to Ninja Metrics, include:

New Users, Daily Active Users, Retention

Revenue per user

Session length and number of sessions per user

Additionally, they provide predictive analytics, customer lifetime value, and cohort analysis. If this is your gig, there’s a conference for that as well – the Gaming Analytics Summit !

At the Game Developers Conference recently held in San Francisco, the focus of this event has shifted over the years from computer games to new gaming platforms that need to incorporate mobile, smartphone, and online components. In order to produce a successful game, it requires the following:

Needs to be able to connect to a variety of devices and platforms

Needs to use data to drive decisions and improve user experience

Needs to ensure privacy laws are adhered to.

Developers are able to quickly access online gaming data and tweak or change their sprites’ attributes dynamically to maximize player experience.

When you look at what is happening in the gaming industry, you can start to see why colleges and universities like my own alma mater, WPI, now offers a computer science degree in Interactive Media and Game Design degree . The IMGD curriculum includes heavy coursework in data science, game theory, artificial intelligence and story boarding. When I asked a WPI IMGD student about what they are working on, they are mapping out decision trees that dictate what adversary to pop up based on the player’s history (sounds a lot like what we do in digital marketing…).

As we start to look at the Millennial Generation entering into the workforce, maybe we should look at our own recruiting efforts and consider game designers. They are masters in analytics and creativity with an appreciation for the importance of great data. Combining the magic and the math makes a great gaming experience. Who wouldn’t want that for their customers?